Featured on PDR in the collection John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778)

It’s too late to save the leg, which has been bitten off below the knee. But Brook Watson, the floating blonde youth depicted in Copley’s oil painting, will be rescued from the jaws of this tiger shark and go on to enjoy a long life as a London merchant, becoming Lord Mayor in 1796 and a baronet in 1803. His rise bred envy: “in spite of his later elevation”, wrote one of Copley’s detractors, “there are those whose sympathy is with the shark”.